


Roomies

by HostisHumaniGeneris



Category: Original Work
Genre: Crack, Other, bad roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:47:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/pseuds/HostisHumaniGeneris
Summary: Andy's new roommate, Nate's an odd one.  Admittedly, when he wept blood and his face peeled back that was something.  And the weird cult that hangs around him is starting to get on Andy's nerves.  And then there's the fact that the police are looking into the cult.Ah well, Andy's had worse roommates before.Somehow.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 27
Collections: Original Works Opportunity 2020





	Roomies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



Andy shifted the grocery bag in his arms, fumbling in his pocket to retrieve his keys. Pushing them in the lock and turning it, he shoved the door open. He shoved the door open wide and pushed his way in, lifting the other bag of groceries off the poured concrete in front of the graduate residence. 

“Nah-zah-zo-ta. Nah-zah-zo-ta.”

A half-dozen pale, gaunt faces turned to look at him as the door swung upon. Andy sighed. He told Nate he’d be out for a half hour, tops. And that _fuckin’ cult_ showed up.

Okay, so maybe he lingered in the store for a little bit longer. Andy looked down, checking his watch. It had been an hour fifteen already? Huh.

Still, they had an understanding, allegedly. The cult could show up _Sundays._ And… okay, senioritis had set in and time no longer had meaning, but he was reasonably sure it was Saturday. He sighed, audibly, and then wheeled around to the kitchen of the two-bedroom apartment. He never had been good at telling his roommates off, especially when they had friends over.

The paper bags rustled as he pulled items out. He was ignoring the cult, but at the same time, he listened for them to resume chanting. Because if they did not…

“The master… demands a sacrifice.”

Andy wheeled around to look face to face at the apparent spokesman. The guy was, like all the cultists, thin and frail looking. Like a paler, even more skeletal Pete Cushing. The corners of the man’s mouth curved upwards as he let words sink in. A sacrifice.

Andy let out _another_ frustrated sigh, turned back to the groceries and picked up the chicken. He had taken to making his meals for the week in advance. A whole chicken would’ve lasted him until Wednesday… if he cooked it Sunday. Tomorrow then. 

Wait, was today Sunday?

Jesus Christ the semester was getting to him.

Whatever, point was he was holding a shrink-wrapped chicken and shoving his way past Cushing, to the other cultists. They began to intone again, gleeful about the sacrifice. Andy looked past them, to the many eyes and undulating meet in the center of the main living room. “Here you go. That alright for you?”

He then winged the bird at Nate.

One of those long fiberous limbs shot out, spearing the bird in midair—a rotisserie chicken would be good right now—and reeled it in. There was a squelching and a crunching as the thing was drawn into a mouth with too many teeth moving in too many directions. Well, guess it’d be grilled cheese and Spaghetti-Os tonight. Some Sunday dinner.

Wait… it was Saturday, right?

Looking annoyedly at the cult leader, Andy asked “We cool?”

Nate _trilled_. Andy rolled his eyes. Yup, couldn’t say ‘we cool’ right back, had to put on airs in front of the cultists. Their shoulders all went slack, which Andy took meant that _yes_ , they didn’t get to sacrifice the interloper.

Like Nate would kill the guy who had the Netflix password.

Andy wheeled around, brushing past Cushing and back to the kitchen, hastily putting everything in the grocery bags in the fridge haphazardly. Then he went down the short hallway to his room. “By the way, I’ve got a midterm to study for, mind keeping it down?”

More trilling.

The chants didn’t appear any quieter as Andy closed his door, sat on his bed, opened his laptop, and started browsing youtube. He did have a midterm to study for… later. Right now, he was looking up Lets Plays—broke as fuck he wasn’t going to be able to play any of the new release in anything like a timely fashion, but he could at least look.

More trilling, and chanting.

Andy let out a sigh and picked his laptop bag off the floor where it had been since he got home from classes yesterday… or the day before. Whenever Friday was. Fishing out a pair of earbuds, he put them in the headphone jack of his computer and pumped the volume up a bit. He didn’t like to raise the volume, but wanted to drown out the transcosmic chanting to daemoniac beings—he made the mistake of watching some dumb youtube sketch comedy/movie review shows a few weeks back and Nate laid into him over how inconsiderate it was.

Andy had bit his tongue at that.

Nate, or Nazathoa (give or take some apostrophes) was never quiet, what with the random transcosmic chanting and the cult ceremonies and the occasional screaming of antiquarian investiagors and the fact that he always turned the volume all the way up when watching Netflix... _Andy's_ Netflix. But yeah… that wasn’t an argument that Andy wanted to have out to the end, given that the flesh sloughed off of Nate’s face and the eyes blinked and pseudopods were writhing whenever Andy tried to talk to him man-to-man... man-to-evil squidgod. 

Still, at least Nate was good enough to mop up the congealing ichor when all was said and done. Didn't leave a mess for Andy to clean... especially not over winter break when Andy was out of state visiting his folks and couldn't clean it up until he returned to campus.

Yeah… Nate was… not the _best_ roommate, bat at the same time, he was putting forth an effort. Why, when he was casually dismissive of ‘inferior creatures of flesh and bone’? Well… there was Netflix. Apparently. Why did Nate watch Romantic comedies on Netflix? Why did Nate do anything? Why the fuck was Nate even in school--He was a freaky god monster.

It’d keep Andy up at night if it wasn’t for coffee and essay writing keeping Andy up all night.

Still, Andy tried to look on the bright side. They’d gotten off on the right-ish foot, with Nates rather frequent lapses into fugue states pondering the mysteries of the chaotic universe meaning he didn't cause _too_ much trouble. Which was more to say for most of his roommates here. Like, Bill. God, _that_ guy was a tool. But yeah, Bill was an ass, and Andy could chalk Nate's... being Nate to the fact he was just a weird study abroad student… okay, yeah, he ended up being from a lot further away than Lichenstein, but whatever. Indescribable non-Euclidean horrors were a lot less terrifying when you sucked at math and geometry and had no clue what Euclidean meant.

Plus, his first year, Andy was sharing this apartment with Bill, who was enrolled in the same grad program. The lowkey competition was kinda bad. They were… not really helping each other study, so much as passive aggressively mentioning the material and 'just checking' to see if the other agreed on what the giant ass textbook actually said--somehow the two of them had come to wildly divergent understandings of the course material, and it was maddening for Andy—did _he_ not get the material, or did Bill? Well… given how things shook out, he guessed he was right. Still, Nate studying Medieval Metaphysics and Comparative Theosophy meant no real crossover. 

And y’know, occasional chicken aside, Nate never agreed to go half-in on groceries, spend half the money on booze when he new Andy didn’t drink, and then use the food bought with the other half to make some disgusting slow cooker concoction—that nobody would eat. Seriously, coming back from Christmas break to a rainbow mold collection in all of the plastic containers left in the fridge was… marginally less, or maybe more, terrifying than Nate's face sloughing off and him speaking in a dozen voices when he found out all the Marvel movies were off Netflix.

Man, _fuck_ Bill.

So yeah, okay, there were _occasional_ horrible slurries of meat and something else in the fridge on occasion, but never using the groceries that Andy bought. If Nate ran to the store to make something—okay that was unlikely, because Nate never cooked anything—but if he did, and he made the stuff, and he would always finish the stuff before it spoiled… that was fine.

…

Andy tried not to think too hard about the fact that there were a lot less squirrels and crows on campus this semester, ever since Nate showed up. Probably was not related.

Hm. Pausing the supercut of every finishing move in this fighting game he was following, Andy pulled out the earbuds. The chanting was over. 

Still, he should _probably_ give it another half hour. Like… two weeks ago he didn’t wait, and… yeah. Some things were definitely better left unseen.

Also… freaky cosmic chanting on the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday (Andy had finally checked the date on his computer and it was a Sunday. Crap.) beat the semester that he shared the apartment with a comp sci guy. Every day he set his phone to play some different big dumb meme song. Gangam style, that Fox one, Baby Shark.

At max volume.

Loud enough to wake Andy an hour before _his_ alarm was set to go off.

Not loud enough to wake the comp sci guy. Still, comp sci guy. Ron? Rob? Rod? Comp sci guy. They didn’t talk much, didn’t split the grocery bill, and aside from the unnecessary wake-up call, that was all Andy could ask for.

…

Now that he thought of it, that was something that Nate had the edge on Comp sci guy. Because Nate didn’t sleep. He just… stood at the corner and stared. From sunset, to when Andy came to make the post-supper pot of coffee, past midnight when Andy had finished it. Didn’t move. And _usually_ didn’t shed his skin and get ichor over anything. Bonus, no alarm clock. He’d just “unpause” at dawn. Sometimes while Andy was in the middle of making breakfast.

So yeah, horrible eldritch abominations actually had a bit to recommend themselves as roommates.

Still… Nate was outclassed by the one Business major guy. Dave? Andy and Dave had said maybe five words total to one another the entire semester; it was _perfect_. That was a good relationship for roommates, Nate thought. Dave... yeah, probably Dave... definitely had Nate beat.

Suddenly, the silence from the peanut gallery was broken by hushed murmuring. And yelling. Almost as loud as that time Bill ran a drunken poker night until three A.M. Or the time that Bill hosted a Presidential State of the Union Address viewing party-slash-drinking game, or the time that…

Y’know, _fuck_ Bill.

But anyways, the cultists were piping up again. Unusual. Not their normal chanting or that random wheezing grunting when Andy had caught an eyeful of things he wasn't supposed to see, but some rapid, almost panicked-sounding ranting. And wait… was that a helicopter in the distance? And sirens?

“UNBELIEVERS!” Screamed a voice from the other end of the door. The cult leader. Nate trilled angrily. Was it angry? Probably. “DEFEND HIS HOLINESS!”

And a louder voice chimed in, from the same direction as the helicopter rotors. “You’re surrounded! We know you're in there."

Andy closed his eyes and sighed, shut his laptop, and shoved it in the bag. He opened his bedroom and walked through the door, scowling, when the cultists all turned to face him. The leader raised a hand an pointed a finger at him. “What have you wrought upon us, Apostate?!”

“What have _I_ done? You guys are the cult worshipping the tentacle monster.” Andy shot back, turning to Nate. “No offense, of course.”

He took the trilling to be of understanding. Or disappointment at the low blow Andy had struck. Didn't really matter at this point.

That was not enough for the cult leader. “This has to be because you shared your Netflix password!”

“Uh-huh.” Andy said, stepping forward and pulling the curtain back. That was… _a lot of cops_. “And I’m sure you’ve done nothing wrong... except asking me for my Netflix password and that whole thing two weeks ago.”

"That was not for your eyes, nonbeliever!"

So much skin. So much skin.

"Right, so this is either about my Netflix password, _that_ , or..."

Andy let it hand, glaring at the cultists until one of them--the one he recognized from campus and thought was cute and was trying to work up the nerve to talk to outside of these cult sessions--sheepishly offered. "The ritual murders?"

"Aaaand... I think that's probably why the cops are here." Andy said. 

"But we need those eyeballs. We need all of the eyeballs." She protested.

Well, she had just gotten a lot less cute right about now. Andy shrugged, turned, and left the apartment, hands raised. And he promptly got tackled for his trouble. A dozen cops were asking a dozen questions at once, and he had no clue which to answer. Still… “Is this about the Netflix password?”

“DON’T MOVE!” One of the cops said. Which Andy _couldn't_ underneath a pile of cop. Singular.

And that was when the cultists charged out of the apartment. The cop holding him down suddenly had something very much more important to deal with, and Andy took the opportunity to get to his feet and get some distance between the melee.

Shouts of “Heretic!” were met with “You’re under arrest for Marijuana possession!”

"Wait... Marijuana possession?" Andy turned and asked at the melee. Huh… _so that’s what the ‘Sacred Herb’ the cultists were always burning was_. God damn it, if Nate just wanted his friends to come over to get blazed, he should’ve just said so. 

“Your ends will be swift! The master shall!”

“You have the right to remain silent!”

“The Master shall!”

And then the Buzzing. And the sound of a door being knocked off it's hinges--Andy's door. Nate apparently came out to play. Okay… "Y'know that's gonna cost us the security deposit, right Nate?"

Apologetic buzzing? Apathetic buzzing? It was hard to tell when mixed with the screaming and gunfire.

Andy turned and walked away. _Quickly_. That’d probably sort itself out. He’d go… study in the library. Yeah. That sounded like a plan. He got more work done studying out of his room, goofed off about too much. Yep, that sounded like a plan.

As more cop cars screamed down the road, he kept on his path. A trio of older folks—professors, Andy guessed approached him. Okay, they were all carrying a bunch of old leatherbound books and flasks and stuff. Okay, so the elderly academics had apparently gotten involved. One of them was muttering in latin. “Nate’s by the graduate residences, guy…”

A cop car sailed overhead, slamming into the sidewalk behind the professors. Who, to their credit, picked up the pace and started changing in latin, louder. 

Yeah, definitely the library sounded like a good place to study.

…

And still, somehow Nate was still not as awful as Bill.

**Author's Note:**

> To the requestor, I hope you enjoyed it! Please let me know if there's anything you'd prefer, tonally/choice of monsterwise/whatever!


End file.
